"But I I hardly know you" Frontispiece in color
"He tended the fire that was between them" 88
"Every night at midnight Paul called her on the 'phone" 132
"Bob and Paul stood bowing and smiling" 160

PROLOGUE

Barbara Garratry was thirty and Irish. To the casual observer the world
was a bright coloured ball for her tossing. When she was a tiny mite her
father had dubbed her "Bob, Son of Battle," because of certain obvious,
warlike traits of character, and "Bob" Garratry she had been ever since.

She had literally fought her way to the top, handicapped by poverty,
very little education, the responsibility of an invalid and dependent
father. She had been forced to make all her own opportunities, but at
thirty she was riding the shoulders of the witch success.

Her mother, having endowed her only child with the gift of a happy
heart, went on her singing way into Paradise when Bob was three. Her
father, handsome ne'er do well that he was, made a poor and intermittent
living for them until the girl was fifteen. Then poor health overtook
him, and Bob took the helm.

At fifteen she worked on a newspaper, and discovered she had a
picturesque talent for words. Literary ambition gripped her, a desire to
make permanent use of the dramatic elements which she uncovered in her
rounds of assignments. She had a nose for news and made a fair success,
until she took to sitting up at night to write "real stuff" as she
called it. Her nervous, high strung temperament would not stand the
strain, so, true to her Irish blood, she gave up the newspaper job, with
its Saturday night pay envelope, and threw herself headlong into the
uncharted sea of authorship.

She began with short stories for magazines. Editors admitted her,
responded to her personality returned her tales. "If you could write
the way you talk," they all said. Now Daddy Garratry had to eat, no
matter how light she could go on rations, so she abandoned literature
shortly for a position in a decorator's shop. Here, too, she found charm
an asset. She worked eight hours a day, cooked for two of them, washed,
sewed, took care of her invalid, lavished herself upon him, then wrote
at night, undaunted by her first failure.

She used her brain on the problem of success. When the manager of the
shop put her in charge of their booth at the Arts and Crafts Exhibition,
because, as he said, "you can attract people," she recalled the
consensus of editorial opinion, and made up her mind that personality
was her real gift. The stage was the show window for that possession, so
thither she turned her face at eighteen, and in due course of time
joined the great army which follows the mirage of stage success.

But Bob proved to be one of the god's anointed, and from the first the
charm of her, her queer, haunting face, which some found ugly and some
proclaimed beautiful, marked her for advance. She was radiantly happy in
the work, and happier still that she was able to provide more comforts
and luxuries for daddy, who was her idol. The real crux of her ambition
was the day when she could give him everything his luxury loving heart
desired.

She worked hard, she learned the trade of the theatre. She studied her
audiences, noted their likes and dislikes, what they laughed at, and
when they wept. Then once again she took up her abandoned pen and began
to work on a play. She and daddy talked it, played it, mulled it over
every waking hour for months... Continue reading book >>